Kicked in the Spectacles

To great fanfare, Snap, Inc. went public a little over a year ago, and in spite of the excitement over the IPO, the company has delivered a return of about negative 50% to those embraced the offering. Since then, the company has struggled to distinguish itself and get its stock hot again, but nothing has really worked so far.

The company introduced a line of sunglasses with the terribly inventive name “Spectacles“, but it was a bomb, and hundreds of thousands of them wound up unsold, probably left to rot in a public dump somewhere. Undaunted, the company has launched its follow-up product, not terribly inventively named “Spectacles 2.” Like its predecessor, it’s basically a way to film people in front of you with built-in cameras:

Looking at it from the top, you can see how they look like some neckbeard who has never left his parents’ basement invented them. I mean, can you actually imagine putting these damned things on? To say nothing of the fact that your friends might not be too thrilled with your filming their every movement and recording every word.

As I’m typing this, the stock is up all of four pennies on the news, so it seems like the market isn’t considering the gross accoutrements above to be the firm’s salvation. It’ll be interesting to see what happens on May 1st, when the company announces their latest earnings. Last quarter, the stock exploded higher, but every morsel of that gain was lost soon thereafter.